Lighting elements are sometimes used to illuminate a system, such as a consumer product, wearable accessory, novelty item, or the like. Existing illuminated systems, however, are generally only capable of exhibiting fixed illumination with one or more light sources. An existing wearable accessory, for example, might utilize a single white-light bulb as an illumination source, with the white-light shining through a transparent colored material. Such accessories only exhibit an illumination of a single type (a function of the color of the transparent material) or at best, by varying the intensity of the bulb output, a single-colored illumination with some range of controllable brightness. Other existing systems, to provide a wider range of colored illumination, may utilize a combination of differently colored bulbs. Such accessories, however, remain limited to a small number of different colored states, for example, three distinct illumination colors: red (red bulb illuminated); blue (blue bulb illuminated); and purple (both red and blue bulbs illuminated). The ability to blend colors to produce a wide range of differing tones of color is not present.
Techniques are known for producing multi-colored lighting effects with LEDs. Some such techniques are shown in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,016,038, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/215,624, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,150,774, the teachings of which are incorporated herein by reference. While these references teach systems for producing lighting effects, they do not address some applications of programmable, multi-colored lighting systems.
For example, many toys, such as balls, may benefit from improved color illumination processing, and/or networking attributes. There are toy balls that have lighted parts or balls where the entire surface appears to glow; however there is no ball available that employs dynamic color changing effects. Moreover, there is no ball available that responds to data signals provided from a remote source. As another example, ornamental devices are often lit to provide enhanced decorative effects. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,086,222 and 5,975,717, for example, disclose lighted ornamental icicles with cascading lighted effects. As a significant disadvantage, these systems apply complicated wiring harnesses to achieve dynamic lighting. Other examples of crude dynamic lighting may be found in consumer products ranging from consumer electronics to home illumination (such as night lights) to toys to clothing, and so on.
Thus, there remains a need for existing products to incorporate programmable, multi-colored lighting systems to enhance user experience with sophisticated color changing effects, including systems that operate autonomously and systems that are associated with wired or wireless computer networks.